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coUrbanize in the News

Thanks to coUrbanize’s dramatic growth in 2018 and the company’s work with JBG Smith in Crystal City, Virginia, future site of Amazon’s HQ2, BostInno selected coUrbanize as one of the 19 startups to watch in the coming year.

Detroit may be behind on rolling out a full sustainability action agenda, but the city is agile and catching up fast with a new set of digital tools to foster engagement among the community. To get input from Detroiters, they’re using a set of digital tools from coUrbanize.

Boston may not have been selected as a site of Amazon’s second headquarters, but this Boston-area startup is playing a key role in shaping the future of Crystal City, one of the two locations for HQ2. coUrbanize is working with developer JBG Smith, which owns most of the real estate in Crystal City, Virginia, to collect community input that will shape Arlington’s HQ2.

The editors of Real Estate Forum have selected coUrbanize Founder & CEO Karin Brandt as one of this year’s 50 Under 40 honorees.

Chosen from a pool of nearly 400 highly qualified nominations, the rising stars who made the short list are already establishing their presence in the industry. Under Brandt’s leadership, coUrbanize has become one of the leading online community engagement platforms for real estate for such firms as Boston Properties, WinnCompanies, Brookfield and many others.

When JBG Smith Properties began planning Crystal City’s Central District, the developer wanted feedback from a broad segment of the community on the multifaceted project — not just the typical handful of citizens who have the time to testify at public hearings.

JBG Smith Executive Vice President Andrew Van Horn said the company found a fix: Boston-based coUrbanize, whose technology platform allows developers to gather feedback from community members via text, social media and comments posted in online forums.

Affordable housing developers are facing greater constraints, both financially and from NIMBYs, and at the same time the need for affordable housing is increasing. In this Q&A, GlobeSt.com spoke with Karin Brandt, coUrbanize founder & CEO, and Laura Bailey, head of community finance and community affairs at Capital One Bank about how developers can do a better job of bringing the community in to conversations affecting their neighborhoods.

The Sustainability Action Agenda is Detroit’s first effort to carve out city and community actions aimed at protecting public health, providing jobs and addressing climate impacts and green infrastructure.

The city will be conducting surveys, hosting town halls and engaging in community outreach through 14 district ambassadors to gather input from at least 7,000 Detroiters, officials said.

Karin Brandt, the founder and CEO of coUrbanize, spoke with Jennifer Bradley of the Aspen Institute for the Center for Urban Innovation’s series of conversations with inclusive innovation practitioners.

coUrbanize opens up public comment to everyone, not just the few people who are able to go to planning meetings.

In Seattle’s Central District, a plan for a massive new development with hundreds of apartments and a high-end grocer fell through in 2017, in part because of criticism about gentrification and displacement of the neighborhood’s shrinking black community. But in late January, a new developer easily got city approval for another design for the site with more affordable housing, a public square, and a portion of retail space dedicated to local businesses.

Boston has been Crane City for the last five years or more: construction everywhere you look, and detour signs, too.

Much less noticeable has been a boom in startups focused on buildings. Entrepreneurs are looking at a massive industry and seeing opportunity: Construction spending on private projects in the United States hit a record high of $1.25 trillion in December, according to the Commerce Department. And while that enormous number includes everything from architectural design to laying bricks, it doesn’t include the cost of renting out the space or managing it once the work is complete. That equals even more opportunity for entrepreneurs.

As cities make their data more transparent and accountable, this project in New York found one way to use technology to engage the residents in the planning process—by prompting locals to text in ideas.

“I’d like to buy culturally conscious books and cards that represent me,” writes one commenter. A few others keep their requests for Brownsville, Brooklyn, pretty simple—a Burger King or a Chase Bank would do.

These are comments left by residents of Brownsville in response to a prompt to tell city officials “what’s missing” in their neighborhood. The answers populated an online map, a tool used by New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) in a new planning project. Earlier this month, Mayor de Blasio and the HPD released the Brownsville Plan, an outcome of a year’s worth of planning by the community and municipality, which will create 2,500 new affordable homes and spruce up the neighborhood’s cultural and recreational facilities. According to the comments on the map, these are very welcome additions.

A new survey posted on MARTA’s dedicated transit-oriented development website, coUrbanize, offers Atlantans a potential glimpse at the future of acres of parking surrounding the East Lake MARTA Station.